Rogueywon • Comments
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The quest for Shadow of the Colossus' last secret
Introducing the secret seekers and their eight-year quest
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Sid Meier's cultural victory
"If there's anything in reality that's not fun, we will change it."
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Gran Turismo 6 preview: The turning point
With the amount of free time I have for gaming these days, if it has races longer than 15 minutes and no rewind button, I'm not interested. Reply -4
That's the feature that's a deal breaker/maker for me. Reply -2
Face-Off: Metro: Last Light
Early in the generation, the differences were small enough and the PC ports often nasty enough that I was doing most of my gaming (bar WoW and twitch fpses) on consoles, despite having a gaming PC. These days, it's only worth firing up the consoles for exclusives. My 360 hasn't been used since Forza Horizon, though Ni No Kuni is keeping the PS3 in use for now.
I've been playing Last Light on an i7-3820 with an Nvidia 680. Running in 1080p full-detail has given perfectly acceptable framerates and no noticable glitches by the point I'm up to (around 4 hours in). It's no Crysis 3 in graphical terms, but it's still impressive given what we've heard about the budgets. Reply +3
Gran Turismo 5 retrospective
There needed to be a lot more effort put into making it the game enjoyable, rather than an exercise in grinding tedium. A Forza style rewind button would have been a good start. So would an emphasis on having more and more enjoyable tracks. Beyond that, the out of box AI was utterly appalling, though later patches made some minor improvements.
In the time between the release of GT4 and GT5 the first three Forza games were released and most of the development on Forza 4 was done. GT4 was substantially better than the original Forza, but GT5 was, in most respects, only level pegging at best with Forza 3 and well behind Forza 4. Racing games as a genre work quite well with 1 or 2 year evolutionary release cycles, rather than going away into a locked room for years and years. Reply +6
Sid Meier's Ace Patrol, a turn-based WW1 strategy game for iOS, announced
We learn very little about WW1 today - not just about how it was fought, but about the reasons why it was fought. The particular brands of authoritarian militarism that underpinned the Central Powers were particularly unpleasant. We don't have as much imagery today to allow us to understand that unpleasantness as we do for the fascist ideologies that underpinned the Axis powers in WW2, but the world today would have looked very different if those ideologies hadn't been confronted.
And the nature of warfare at the time was one which involved mass casualties. There really weren't many other options for opposing the Central Powers. Modernisation and industrialisation had put paid to the older ways of war, where armies were small and battles usually decided once one side had taken 20% casualties (including wounded as well as dead).
To turn this around for a moment - the Union could have chosen to allow the Confederacy to go its own way and could have avoided the US Civil War - a horribly bloody conflict. If it hadn't done so, then maybe the Confederacy would have collapsed under the weight of its own economic inefficiency - or maybe we'd still have a large and influential slave-stage as a player on the world-stage today. Reply +2
Less costly forms of offensive only because available once tanks capable of moving faster than walking speed, fighter-bombers and radio artillery co-ordination systems became available. We learned those techniques as WW1 went on and made good use of them in 1918, when even the Western Front became a war of maneuver again. But really, until the latter stages of WW1, they just weren't an option. The technology finally came together in 1918, enabling first the Central Powers' Spring Offensive and then the (war-winning) Entente Powers' "100 Days" offensive. Both of those can be seen as prototypes for the Axis offensives of 1939 and 1940 (which the Allies were horribly and inexplicably unprepared for).
Tanks, when they were available at all, moved at walking speed and broke down frequently until late in the war. Aircraft capable of performing properly as fighter-bombers only starting coming online late in the war. And artillery co-ordination remained horribly weak until at least the latter parts of 1917.
Real life war is not like an RTS. It isn't tuned and balanced. Generals work with the tools they have available and those tools are often imperfect, changeable and poorly understood. From the US Civil War through to around 1917, those tools were basically ideally designed to cause deadlock.
Yes, WW1 generals made poor decisions and mistakes from time to time. But actually, many of them (including Haig) were remarkably open to innovation compared to the military commanders of other eras. Reply +4
WW1 was fought during one of the most rapid periods of technological advance in history. It saw the introduction of tanks and combat aircraft and major advances in artillery technology. Against that backdrop, most serious studies of WW1 show that the generals (and remember, officers had a higher casualty rate than enlisted men) probably did as good a job as could reasonably be expected, given that the rules of the game were changing under their feet all the time in a way that they haven't in any other conflict in history.
There are plenty of other misconceptions, including that the war was just trench warfare (which was only really dominant on the Western Front, and only really from 1915 through to the very start of 1918). In fact, it's rare you can even find people today who know which side of the conflict nations such as Italy, Turkey and Japan fought on.
If there is a real example of tragic stupidity from military commanders around WW1, it comes after the war, when pretty much everybody except Germany forgot the lessons that ended the trench-war deadlock; the combined infantry/artillery/armour/air-support rapid offensive tactics (mostly pioneered by the British) that would later become known as Blitzkreig. Instead, those lessons were forgotten in most of the world as soon as the war ended and the result was the Maginot Line.
Sorry for the rant; generalisations like yours just make me quite cross. Reply +7
Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2 spotted for PS3, Vita release
Absolutely hilarious (in retrospect) conversation with a colleague around the time of the release of GTA4...
We were talking about "the original" GTA, or so I thought. But then I get this feeling that we're not actually talking about the same game. He's talking about cutscenes and stuff, and characters that I'm pretty sure just were not in the first GTA.
"Wait a minute," I say, "we're talking about the top-down 2d game here, right?"
"What? No! We're talking about the first game - GTA3!"
"You know GTA3 wasn't the original, right?"
"You what? Of course it was!"
"The clue's... kind of in the number 3?"
Yes, there are honestly people out there who thought that GTA3 was the start of the series. Sometimes I despair. Reply +69
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon review
Without that, it will have to settle for second best. Reply 0
UK chart: Dead Island: Riptide scores top spot despite selling less than half the original
Decent games like Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider have sold well (even if the latter missed its publisher's ludicrous expectations). Reply +13
Sony announces Vita game Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery
The Vita may be tanking as a "PS3 in your pocket" AAA gaming machine, but it's doing really, really well at getting the interesting, quirky stuff.
I bought a Vita at launch, played avidly through many of the launch titles, then kind of... forgot about it. But then a few months ago, I started finding reasons to pick it up again - and these reasons are getting more and more frequent. Reply +18
Wii U Virtual Console goes live in Europe tomorrow
Despite Kickstarter shortfall, Defense Grid 2 development now under way
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Souls Hackers dated for the US in April
The current anime adaptation is turning out to be more watchable than expected (past SMT adaptations have tended to be fairly poor), so my interest in playing the game has risen sharply in recent weeks. Reply +1
Pizza Hut launches Xbox 360 delivery app
I got a leaflet from Pizza Hut through my letter box the other day, advertising their new hot-dog stuffed-crust pizzas. Now, don't get me wrong, I've actually enjoyed the occasional pizza from them in the past. But this particular concoction is one of the most disgusting looking things I've ever seen advertised as food. It's like a tumour and a traffic accident got together and had a baby. Reply +23
Japan's popular rhythm arcade series Idolmaster released as three $55 apps
This is Namco-Bandai and it's a franchise whose value is predicated on its ability to extract vast amounts of cash from a relatively small pool of hardcore otaku in Japan.
If titles from the series are available overseas at a more normal price-point, that creates a huge reverse-import problem for them.
I suspect this will sell around a dozen copies - all of them to gaming journalists - and Namco-Bandia will conclude that the series has no future outside of Japan.
Which is a slight pity, because if you ignore the overpriced DLC, the games are fun. Reply 0
However, there's absolutely no way that Westerners will pay these prices for a cut-down version of the game - certainly not on a mobile platform. This has got to be one of the most extreme examples of Galapagos Syndrome in the gaming world I've seen.
Edit: also, I'd bet a lot of money that as the game's audio is almost certainly Japanese-only, the price is set as it is to prevent reverse-importing, which otaku-milking Japanese game and anime publishers live in mortal terror of. Reply +4
EA announces FIFA 14 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Going for FIFA 14 looks like a high risk strategy compared to that - so not quite sure what they're playing at. Reply +9
Saturday Soapbox: The high cost of free-to-play
Any responsible company which hopes to have a future in the industry lasting more than 2 years or so needs to either dump this model, or incorporate elements of it in only the most lightweight of ways. I'd say DS3, where the microtransactions are in reality deeply optional is about as far as anybody sensible should dare take it.
It won't stop the get-rich-quick merchants, but it might at least insulate the "proper" industry a bit once the lawsuits and the legislation start flying around.
Oh, and things are going to get really brutal for the mobile platforms currently swamped by this crud. Reply +16
Strike Vector is an impressive looking aerial combat game made by four people
But the cynic in me is just waiting for those dreaded three words to show up "free to play". Reply +2
Forza and Ryse to be next Xbox launch titles
Jeff Minter returns to Tempest with new Vita game
Resident Evil: Revelations will get a Season Pass
Rayman Legends delay has spawned 30 new levels